ABSTRACT
It is virtually axiomatic in people's culture that groups are composed of individuals. If they ask how large a group is or how best to characterize it, they are surely thinking about the specific members that, we assume, make the group what it is. A group member with an issue, whether it is a response to another member, an anxious or hopeless state of mind, an obsessive preoccupation, or a difficulty in joining the work of the group at any given moment, is asked to find the subgroup composed of others who share that issue. Developmental psychology has taught people that there is a critical moment when young children first realize they are somebody. Over time, experience teaches that this possession is partial and provisional. The system-centered world, then, is not a world of human objects interacting and colliding, but a world of energies merging and diverging, vectoring and differentiating.
